Domestic Politics

In March, President José Eduardo dos Santos announced his retirement “from active political life in 2018”. As he had repeatedly made similar announcements since at least 2001 without following through, this was met with a healthy dose of scepticism, especially as the date, 2018, was after the next elections, scheduled for 2017. To many, this implied that dos Santos would run again as the top candidate of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (‘Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola’; mpla) in 2017, and hand over power to his chosen successor after the elections. Dos Santos was reconfirmed as the party’s president unopposed at the mpla congress in August. Two of dos Santos’s children, José Filomeno ‘Zénú’ dos Santos and Welwitschea ‘Tchizé’ dos Santos Pego, were elected to the party’s Central Committee, and Defence Minister João Lourenço was elected party vice president, rather than any of the usual suspects from the party’s ‘old guard’, such as previous party vice president Roberto de Almeida.

This further fed speculation that had already arisen in January that Lourenço might be selected to run as the party’s number two after dos Santos in the 2017 elections, rather than current Vice President of the Republic (and number two) Manuel Vicente. In December, however, much to everyone’s surprise, the party’s Central Committee ‘leaked’ the mpla’s list of candidates for the 2017 elections, which, instead of José Eduardo dos Santos, featured Lourenço as the party’s number one, and hence presidential, candidate, followed by Bornito de Sousa, the current minister of territorial administration (who was in this function also responsible for the organisation of the elections) as number two and thus the probable future vice president. This also confirmed Vicente’s slow but steady fall from grace, which was compounded by his indictment in Portugal in February for active corruption.

Other noteworthy reshuffles during the year included the appointment of Augusto Archer de Sousa Mangueira as new minister of finance and Manuel da Cruz Neto as new head of the civilian office of the presidency, replacing Edeltrudes da Costa. Da Costa had, in his previous functions, ordered the National Bank to transfer funds abroad to companies held by friends of his; in the wake of his dismissal, President dos Santos also ordered the freezing of any transactions previously ordered by da Costa. This did not impede the governor of the National Bank, José Pedro de Morais, from speaking to the ‘Financial Times’ in January about how Angola was a leading force in fighting money laundering in Africa; accordingly de Morais was also dismissed in April, and replaced by the hitherto low-profile Valter Filipe. The previous governor of Kuando Kubango, General Francisco Higino Carneiro, was made governor and first party secretary of Luanda, replacing the ‘firebrand’ Bento Francisco Bento, who was relegated to second vice president of the National Assembly. In Kuando Kubango, Carneiro was replaced by Pedro Mutindi.

At year’s end, there was therefore much speculation as to whether Lourenço’s likely ascent to power did indeed herald the beginning of some form of political change for Angola. However, he was widely regarded as a safe choice signalling more of the same, as he had proven his loyalty to dos Santos after an earlier fall from grace, as well as having impeccable party and army credentials.

Moreover, as the dos Santos family consolidated its stranglehold on key economic assets throughout the year, it became clear that whoever would succeed dos Santos as president of the republic would be economically dependent on the dos Santos family. Dos Santos issued a decree that attributed the upgrading of the Corimba Bay Road in the capital, Luanda, at a cost of $ 567 m, to a consortium led by a company owned by his daughter Isabel. He also put her in charge of the General Metropolitan Master Plan for the restructuring of Luanda, the commission for the readjustment of the oil sector, and the restructuring of the state oil company Sonangol. The last, however, was only the first step in completing Isabel dos Santos’s near-total control over Angola’s political economy, as in June the president appointed her ceo of Sonangol. All these contracts and nominations violated the law of public probity, and her appointment at the helm of Sonangol in particular even met with some, ultimately futile, opposition from within the mpla. State media rushed to her defence, saying that the promotion of Angola’s most successful entrepreneur to head Sonangol demonstrated the company’s strategic importance to the president and that she was the perfect person to turn it around. Isabel dos Santos herself denied any irregularities in her appointment and said she had only been made ceo on the strength of her impeccable track record as a businesswoman. Twelve Angolan lawyers also filed an appeal against this appointment with the Supreme Court. The appeal was at first ignored; the Court then announced in October that it had asked for and received clarifications from the president, Isabel dos Santos and the attorney-general regarding the appointment. The court did not reveal any of the content of these clarifications, and on 29 December confirmed the appointment.

This further confirmed the politicised nature of the judiciary, as similar earlier formal complaints against high-ranking office-holders for corruption and abuse of power – the attorney-general, army generals, province governors or the president of the Republic himself – had not been followed up and were dismissed by the public prosecutor’s office. The judiciary also demonstrated its subservience to the regime in two sham trials that had both started in 2015: on 28 March, the ‘Angola 15+2’ activists, who had been arrested in June 2015, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to eight years, for “preparing acts of rebellion and association with criminals”. Following widespread outcries both at home and abroad, Angola’s ‘roving ambassador’ Luvualu de Carvalho stated that 99% of Angolans did not care about the sentence, and compared the activists to terrorism suspects in the us, reaffirming the jurisdiction of Angola’s judicial institutions to carry out the trial.

A little later, the Supreme Court approved a habeas corpus petition by the activists’ defence team, and they were provisionally released in June, but subject to travel restrictions. In October, the Court ordered an amnesty for the 17 activists, a move largely viewed as political decision to prevent the activists from arguing their case and most likely proving their innocence before the Supreme Court, given the widespread negative publicity for the regime the case had attracted. On 5 April, the leader of the ‘Light of the World’ sect, José Julino Kalupeteca, was sentenced to 28 years in prison for killing nine police officers during the Mt Sumi raid in April 2015. In September, there were also reports that security forces had killed 13 families of followers of Kalupeteca in Kwanza-Sul province.

A lone bright spot was the release on 20 May of Cabindan activist Marcos Mavungo, by the Supreme Court, which decided there were no concrete facts proving the crimes of which Mavungo had been accused and for which he had been sentenced. Also, online activism continued, despite government attempts to clamp down on Internet expression. In March, it was also revealed that Angolans had used two mobile Internet services made available for free to customers in ‘developing countries’ – Facebook Free Basics and Wikimedia Zero – to embed and share large media files such as music and movies behind innocuous image links.

In February, the Movement for the Lunda Tchokwe Protectorate held a demonstration in Cafunfo, Lunda Norte province, to demand greater autonomy for the Lunda provinces. In the same month, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (flec) announced the resumption of its armed struggle for the independence of the oil-rich Cabinda province from Angola. Following the 2012 elections, flec had signalled in vain to the Angolan government its readiness to start a fresh dialogue about substantial autonomy for the province. However, with no government response, the movement resumed its attacks in February and March. These were downplayed by the authorities, but flec claimed to have killed a total of about 40 Angolan soldiers. In May, five men in a speedboat also allegedly boarded a Chevron oil platform off the coast of Cabinda to deliver a warning from flec, inciting foreign workers to leave the province. Following the death of flec’s long-time historical leader Nzita Tiago in his Paris exile in June, flec further intensified its military activities, claiming in September to having killed over 50 people during August. In October, however, the movement’s spokesman, Jean-Claude Nzita, accused the Angolan Armed Forces of killing several flec commanders in the neighbouring Republic of Congo, and appealed for a resumption of dialogue.

Extrajudicial killings were also on the rise in the diamond-rich Lunda provinces, as well as in the shanty towns and suburbs of Luanda. According to the investigative news site ‘Maka Angola’ in September, the Criminal Investigation Service (‘Serviço de Investigação Criminal’: sic) of the National Police was carrying out a crackdown on suspected criminals, and had shot and killed over 100 people since the beginning of the year. Other human rights violations included arbitrary and extrajudicial detention and the denial of access to justice, degrading treatment of prisoners, police violence and the use of torture. Arbitrary housing demolitions in the peripheral neighbourhoods of Luanda also intensified again, leading to the forced relocation of residents and individual cases of deaths during the demolitions or the protests against them.

Media freedom was also constantly restricted. In late January, for example, a majority of the few independent weekly newspapers could not be published, allegedly for technical reasons at the printing press. However, Angolan journalists suspected that the press, owned by generals close to the presidency, had refused to print news about the Kalupeteca trial. Another new weekly, ‘Relatório 10’, launched in October saw its first issue withheld from circulation after someone bought up the entire print run. In January, journalist Mayama Salazar was detained on fabricated charges by the sic. On various occasions, journalists were intimidated, arrested or impeded from accessing informants and sites.

‘Rádio Ecclesia’, the Catholic Church’s independent radio broadcaster, which had for years been applying in vain for a licence to broadcast beyond Luanda, was also beset by problems. In May, its director, Father Quintino Kandanji, very publicly stated that he had refused an eu grant of € 149,631 and that the broadcaster would “not sell out to foreign interests” – a statement very much in line with the government’s take on foreign coverage of the trial of the ‘Angola 15+2’ (see Foreign Affairs, below). The eu delegation stated in response that the amount was simply owed by ‘Ecclesia’ as a return from a previous grant that had not been used. It later transpired that Kandanji had received a $ 50,000 grant from the Ministry of Social Communication, though he himself denied this. Given that, ever since Kandanji had taken over the direction of ‘Ecclesia’ in 2011, programmes had been cancelled and reporters had started complaining about a climate of censorship, it came as a relief to many when in September the Vatican suspended Kandanji at the request of the Church’s lay members.

A new package of media laws, pushed through parliament by the mpla majority on 18 November, included additional restrictions on print media, social media and the activity of journalists, including the creation of a Regulatory Body for Social Communication (dominated by the mpla), which would henceforth be responsible for the accreditation of journalists.

Although opposition parties voted against these laws, their scope for counterbalancing the mpla’s dominance was still limited. The government postponed local elections – again. In May, a rally by the main opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (‘União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola’; unita) in Benguela was attacked by mpla supporters, leading to the death of three civilians. Similar acts of violence and intimidation were registered across the country throughout the rest of the year. Following the beginning of the electoral registration process for the 2017 general elections, opposition parties also complained, but to little effect, that the new electoral register law ‘gutted’ the competences of the nominally independent National Electoral Commission by ­transferring responsibilities to the Ministry of Territorial Administration.

Foreign Affairs

External relations were overshadowed by the economic crisis and the international attention given to the trial of the ‘Angola 15+2’ activists. With international pressure mounting to set the activists free, Foreign Minister George Chicoty in May accused the eu of “manoeuvres to destabilise Angola and its government”, a statement that was widely met with ridicule and exasperation amongst Angolans.

In February, the European Commission asked Portugal to clarify whether recent acquisitions by Isabel dos Santos in Portugal had violated anti-corruption laws. The indictment of Vice President Vicente further soured relations with the former colonial power, which dropped to third place on the list of Angola’s major sources of imports.

That top spot was taken by the usa , whose imports to Angola rose by 62% compared with 2015. However, the usa sharply condemned the sentencing of the ‘15+2’ in an April report on “serious human rights violations”, which was strongly rejected by the Angolan secretary of state for human rights. Relations with Israel were also suspended after Angola voted in favour of a unsc resolution condemning Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank, a resolution made possible by the abstention of the usa.

Relations with China, Angola’s main commercial partner over recent years, were also affected by the oil price crisis, with commercial exchanges dropping by 35% in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2015. In August, the China Development Bank refused to extend further credit to Sonangol, citing “lack of contractual compliance”. Nonetheless, China remained a major supplier of imports, and the China-Angola investment forum, held on 7–8 November, was evidence of continued investor appetite. Angola also continued active commercial exchanges with France and Russia, especially in the area of defence procurement.

Relations with Angola’s other main Lusophone partner, Brazil, were overshadowed by on-going corruption investigations against former Brazilian president Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva and two companies, Petrobras and Odebrecht, both with extensive interests in Angola. This led the Brazilian Development Bank to suspend payments to Angola and Mozambique in October. Cultural exchanges remained important, however, as evidenced by the signing, on 2 March, of an agreement to lay a subsea fibre-optics cable between Angola and Brazil – though this venture was to be financed by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.

Closer to home, Angola was re-elected for a second two-year term to lead the icglr , the other member states having approved of Angola’s management of the crisis in 2014–15. Angola was also elected to head the sadc parliamentary forum in November, though a report published in July confirmed that Angola had the lowest “levels of integration” of all the regional body’s member states. In terms of its relations with the cplp, the International Institute for the Portuguese Language revealed in January that Angola had not ratified at any level of government an orthographic agreement on new rules of spelling. Though the Institute underlined that Angola remained “fully committed” to implementing the reform, it had to take into account local realities and would proceed with the implementation “at its own pace”.

Relations with the neighbouring drc remained ambivalent; although the two countries signed a commercial agreement for the joint exploration zone in January, Angola’s Oil Minister Botelho de Vasconcelos accused the drc of violating the agreement in late April. Angola also followed the political unrest in the drc closely, withdrawing its diplomatic staff in September, and reaching a point in October where the army chief of staff, General Nunda, had to deny the involvement of any Angolan troops in the country’s internal conflicts.

Socioeconomic Developments

Due to continuously low world oil prices and the subsequent drop in government revenues, the year began with a cut in fuel subsidies, resulting in the third hike in fuel prices at the pump in less than a year. This in turn prompted collective taxi operators to raise their fares from 100 to 150 kwanzas (aoa), which the Ministry of Finance accepted, in contrast to their response to earlier attempts to adjust the fares. This prompted widespread, though ultimately ineffective, popular outrage.

In January, the kwanza fell to a record low since 2001, after the National Bank of Angola allowed the currency to depreciate in response to falling export earnings. While the official rate dropped from about aoa 135 to aoa 156 to the dollar, street exchange rates rose to aoa 280 : $ 1. In early April, the informal rate peaked at aoa 620, levelling at about aoa 400 to the dollar at year’s end, meaning that the kwanza had effectively lost 75% of its value since the onset of the oil price crisis. Accordingly, imports dropped, as importers were sitting on stacks of useless and depreciating kwanza and had no, or increasingly difficult and costly, access to hard currency. Given the country’s strong import dependency, the prices of food supplies rose steeply. Though the government introduced price controls for basic foodstuffs in March, many suppliers and supermarkets started rationing food, which led to an expansion of the black market, with speculative and arbitrarily rising prices. As local salaries, paid in kwanza, also lost value by the day and many companies suspended salary payments altogether, there was a resurgence in strikes – for example by teachers in Bengo province, and by dock workers in the port of Lobito, both in September, as well as at Bolloré Africa Logistics Angola, in November.

Despite these worrying developments, the government played down the crisis. In February, Defence Minister Lourenço said the current crisis was “nothing compared to the war”. Authorities also talked up the country’s economic recovery, especially when in May Angola briefly overtook Nigeria as Africa’s largest oil exporter, with production of about 1.7 m b/d. However, both the slight rise in crude oil prices and Angola’s regaining of the first place amongst Africa’s oil-producing nations were largely to do with security issues in Nigeria, which led to lower production levels there, rather than with any structural improvement in the Angolan economy. Moreover, the high levels of debt that Angola had contracted since 2010 and the taking up of new oil-backed loans, together with the renegotiation of repayment deadlines with China since early 2015, meant that three-quarters of these revenues from oil exports were used for debt servicing.

In April, the government submitted a request for a bailout to the imf . Despite the government’s evident failure to heed the lessons from the previous shorter price crash in 2008/09, the imf agreed on 14 June to support the government under the Extended Fund Facility (eff) scheme with a $ 4.5 bn loan package, which would have required further improvements regarding budget transparency. However, on 30 June, following reports that the government had secured an additional $ 1 bn in syndicated loans from commercial lenders through Goldman Sachs, President dos Santos reportedly personally turned down the imf’s eff package, saying the country only wanted to pursue talks on the imf’s annual assessments of the Angolan economy. This decision was described as “negligent” by financial analysts, and as “credit negative” by ratings agency Moody’s.

All the while the president’s son, José Filomeno ‘Zénú’ dos Santos presided over the country’s $ 5 bn sovereign wealth fund, nominally created to help buffer the Angolan economy against oil price shocks, but which was busy investing in luxury properties abroad, and paying exorbitant consultancy fees to companies that existed only on paper and had an ownership structure surprisingly similar to Zénú’s own investment bank, Quantum Capital. In September, it was also revealed that the fund had lost $ 486 m in its first two years of operation; clarifications were not forthcoming. Moreover, given that in March, Angolan economist Carlos do Rosado stated that the assets of Angolan leaders held in foreign banks totalled $ 28 bn, i.e. more than the country’s foreign exchange reserves of $ 24 bn, and that General Kopelipa, the head of the president’s security cabinet, made news in August by ordering the production of bottles of Spanish wine with his head on the label, the lack of success in addressing the economic crisis appeared again more like a question of a lack of political will and misplaced priorities rather than capacity.

The death in February of Lúcio Lara, one of the mpla’s first generation leaders was then also met with much sadness, as Angolans said that with Lara an earlier, perhaps ‘cleaner’ era of the mpla had finally ceased to exist.

The state oil company Sonangol, arguably the government’s most important single source of revenue, was also in trouble because of the low oil price. Following the controversial appointment of Isabel dos Santos as ceo in June, she announced ambitious plans to improve the company’s performance by reducing wasteful spending and trimming core operations back in line. While some commentators saw the restructuring and the appointment of new board members with proven track records and technical competence as a positive signal, inside commentators spoke of a climate of “mistrust”, akin to a hostile takeover, with permissions and competences revoked, and entire floors and office suites declared off limits to existing staff. Angolan investigative journalist Rafael Marques said that Isabel’s appointment was equivalent to “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse”. Given that most of her seed capital for other business ventures had, in fact, been taken out of Sonangol, she was likely to use the opportunity to cover up any traces of previous financial misdeeds. Indicative of such practices was the announcement in December that Sonangol would source all its Christmas gift hampers from the Candando supermarkets, owned by Isabel dos Santos, while during the year the company also hired a consulting company and a human resources service provider owned by her.

More evidence of Sonangol’s mismanagement emerged over the year, without any of the proposed measures having yet had any impact. In July, it was revealed that Sonangol owed $ 13 bn in outstanding debts to Standard Chartered Bank (uk); while the new leadership of the company obtained a reprieve of 45 days to clarify its financial positions, there were reports that manoeuvres were under way to improve the appearance of the company’s financial situation. In October, the us oil company Chevron also demanded the payment of $ 300 m from Sonangol for its share of the operating costs in Block 0 in Cabinda, which Sonangol had stopped honouring since June, while in November employees complained that they had to bring their own toilet paper to work. Minor rays of light for the oil sector were the announcement of the discovery of two new commercially viable oil deposits in the Lower Kwanza Basin and the resumption of production at Angola lng, the liquefied natural gas plant in Soyo.

In addition to her dealings at Sonangol, Isabel dos Santos, through her mobile phone company Unitel, acquired in October a controlling stake in Banco Fomento de Angola; in December, she also announced that her beer bottling plant in Luanda would henceforth produce the Portuguese brand Sagres for the local market, as well as a new local brand, Luandina. This was already the second new domestic beer brand in the year, after Refriango launched in March its new Tigra beer, which it started exporting to Portugal in September.

In March, a steel mill opened 40 km north of Luanda, with the intention of turning the country’s scrap metal – mainly obsolete weapons and discarded material from the civil war – into new steel, with a view to making the country a supplier, rather than an importer of steel by 2020.

Food scarcity was a continuous problem, with unicef revealing in May that close to 100,000 children were facing serious and acute malnutrition, especially in the drought-affected southern provinces of Cunene, Huíla and Namibe, where media reported in February that people were eating ‘weeds’. mpla Deputy João Pinto had his own Marie-Antoinette moment when he said in February that everyone had to tighten their belts and that “instead of eating expensive beef steaks, we’ll eat tuna steaks”. This was somewhat ironic as the Ministry of Commerce had just issued new licences for tuna fishing off Angola’s southern coast to foreign fishing fleets, a deal from which both the production and the revenues would probably flow abroad. The imposition, in July, of an obligation for ambulant street vendors to acquire a commercial licence to carry out their trade legally, allegedly for reasons of public health, was widely seen as further unnecessary administrative and legal hassle for the largely female workforce, who were already struggling to make ends meet in Angola’s informal sector. Angolan sociologist Pedro de Castro Maria commented that, given the general difficulties Angolans had in acquiring identity documents, the measure would probably push informal vendors further into informality and illegality, especially as even people with formal salaries in the public sector had often to resort to some form of informal side-line to sustain their families.

Luanda’s rubbish crisis also continued, despite the creation of a presidential commission to address the issue and the introduction of refuse taxes in March. Increasingly insalubrious conditions in the capital, combined with drastically reduced health funding, resulted in a dramatic yellow fever outbreak, the world’s worst since 1986. The high mortality that ensued was largely a result of a combination of low vaccination rates, poor sanitation, weak diagnostic capacities and ineffective and insufficient treatment, as hospitals lacked even basic supplies such as latex gloves and clean water. In March, unita activists who wanted to donate blood at the Luanda General Hospital were also turned away by the hospital’s management, though it transpired that the hospital was ordered to do so while the mpla’s youth wing, the jmpla were donating blood. From January till May, the Ministry of Health officially recorded 277 deaths, though the actual number was probably higher. In November, the ministry also admitted it had insufficient supplies of tuberculosis vaccine, and malaria and cholera remained major health issues.

Though dropping slightly from 2015 to an estimated 75.6 per 1,000 births in the first year of life, infant mortality remained among the world’s highest at 120/1,000 under-fives, and more than 30% of children showed physical signs of malnutrition such as reduced body height.

This overall underfunding of social spending was aggravated by general budget cuts and higher levels of debt servicing, and was certainly not helped by the fact that defence spending remained Africa’s highest both in absolute and per-capita terms, higher than the defence expenses of South Africa and Nigeria combined.